Writing to know what I think.

Number 8

By Fall of Night: my eighth novel? It can’t be! The years turn and another big story pops out, both milestone, and wayside friend, and nowadays given away like all the rest, without a thought for agent or publisher. It’s an unusual way of working, one a prospective pro, still chasing the dream, will no doubt find bizarre, but I no longer question it. I am not a pro, aspiring or otherwise. I just write stuff for a hobby.

By Fall of Night went up on Feedbooks a couple of weeks ago, and is still getting about 40 hits a day, easily outstripping its slightly longer presence on Smashwords. This is a good reception, and I’d like to thank those who’ve read it for making the writing of Fall of Night all the more worthwhile. If I remember correctly, on Feedbooks, you get about a month of this high profile coverage before you sink into the sedimentary layers and the story becomes more of an archaeological artefact. So let’s enjoy it while we can!

Anyway, Fall of Night speaks of impending doom, and of death, but it’s also a love story. An uncomfortable mix of genres perhaps? Well, if you’re not writing for proper publication, there’s no such thing as “genre” and you can write whatever you want. If you think about it, love is really all that matters in human affairs, although it’s often downplayed. Anything else is just something we make up to amuse ourselves as we go along. Love, the genuine love one human being feels for another, rises above all thought, reason or deed. The promise of it is the only thing worth getting out of bed for. It’s no surprise then one of the most successful computer viruses of all time was the payload of an email containing the header “I love you”. You just have to click.

And many did.

So, By Fall of Night!

It’s hard to describe this story without spoiling it, but here goes: You have Tim and Rebecca, a pair of middle aged oddball teachers. He’s a lifer, becoming cynical of the tickbox culture that’s crept into his profession, weary of his corporate-style headmaster bullying him into wearing a suit, rather than his comfy Harris Tweed. She’s a late recruit, a former West-end dancer, former seminarian, now teaching religious studies. Both have an interest in lucid dreaming – she because, having suffered a crippling injury, it’s the only way she can dance the way she used to do, on stage, and he because he’s a suburban shaman and uses the technique for exploring the baffling subterranean byways of his head.

Scene set, so what next? Well, what if just one of those ridiculous red-top scare stories comes true, and an asteroid the size of greater London looks set to hit the earth in a couple of weeks time? You can forget the usual sci fi nonsense of sending up rockets to deflect it, or landing astronauts on it with an atom bomb; it’s too late for that, and it wouldn’t work anyway, and all the clever men can do is argue about why we didn’t see it coming, while the politicians argue over whether or not the information the clever men are giving us is credible. And the way they all argue, and the way the media blathers on about it, makes the whole of our society, everything we’ve built and call civilised, look a bit stupid. And then, what about you and me? What would we do? Run, scream, lose ourselves in a Hollywood-style pre-Apocalyptic orgy of violence and rapine?

What do Tim and Rebecca do? Well, they fall in love,…

Meanwhile the rich jet off to all corners of the world, away from the spot they’re guessing the asteroid will hit, which just happens to be right where Tim and Rebecca are sitting, in Tim’s weekend cabin, half way up a mountain in the English Lakes. But with the price of aeroplane tickets suddenly exceeding one’s life-savings, the majority of folk, including our hapless lovers have no choice but to stay put. And is this not the best choice anyway, to go out quickly and cleanly, to not know anything about it when it hits? Surely anything else is unthinkable, and to run is simply to escape to a slower death?

Hmm. Grim, you say, and maybe you’re right but what if there’s a way out no one has thought of?

When Tim and Rebecca start meeting up in their dreams they realise the dreamscape transcends the person doing the dreaming, that it’s a place we all share, a place outside of space and time, one we enter every time we close our eyes to sleep. The dreaming also has peculiar properties, like the fact that with a bit of practice, we can wake back from our dreams to any point in our lives that we can remember, from birth to present day. Honest! But don’t try this at home. And living our lives afresh from that point on, maybe we can find a version of our lives that won’t be crushed by an incoming asteroid? Great, you say, let’s do it! But what if, for Tim and Rebecca it’s version of their lives in which they no longer exist for one another?

What should lovers do, then, given the choice? Enjoy the short time remaining to them, or grasp the chance of more time alive, at the price of being eternally separated? Which would you choose? Well of course you would and me too, but who’s saying it’s up to you anyway?

Fresh off the press, lovingly crafted, self-edited and riddled with typos: Fall of night is available on all smartphones and ebook devices near you – hopefully the one in your pocket. You’ll find it in the margin, you’ll find it at Feedbooks and Smashwords, also at Barnes and Noble and W.H.Smith! But most of all you’ll find it’s free!